Vanishing Girls

  “I told you to lower your voice.”

  But it’s too late. Her voice is rising in pitch like steam being forced through a kettle. “So what did happen that night, huh? Because if you know something, you have to talk. You have to tell me.”

  There’s a moment of silence. My heart is drumming hard in my throat, like a fist trying to punch its way out.

  “Fine.” Her voice is shaking now, skipping registers. “Fine. Then don’t tell me. I guess you can just wait until the police knock down your door.”

  The door handle rattles and I jump backward, pressing myself against the wall, as if it will keep me invisible. Then there’s a scraping noise, the sound of a chair jumping backward, and the door handle falls still.

  Andre says, “I don’t know what the hell happened to that little girl.” The way he says little girl makes me feel sick, like I’ve accidentally eaten something rotten. “But if I did know—if I do know—you really think it’s a smart idea to come around here playing Nancy Drew? You think I don’t know how to make problems disappear?”

  There’s a short pause. “Are you threatening me? Because I’m not afraid of you.” This last part is obviously a lie. Even through the door, I can hear that the girl’s voice is shaking.

  “Then you’re dumber than I thought,” Andre says. “Now get the fuck out of my office.”

  Before I can retreat or react, the door swings open so hard it cracks against the wall, and a girl comes rushing out. Her head is down, but still I recognize her immediately from the paper: the pale skin, the straight fringe of black bangs, and the red lipstick, like she’s auditioning for a part in a movie about a vampire from the 1920s. It’s Sarah Snow’s best friend, the girl who supposedly accompanied her to get ice cream the night Madeline disappeared. She pushes past me roughly and doesn’t even stop to apologize, and before I can call out to her, she’s gone, darting animal-like up the stairs.

  I want to go after her, but Andre has already seen me.

  “What do you want?” His eyes are bloodshot. He looks tired, impatient. It’s him: the guy from the photo, leather-jacket guy. He’s nobody, Dara said, months ago. They’re all nobodies. They don’t matter.

  But she was wrong about this one.

  I try to see him as Dara might have. He’s older, maybe early twenties, and his hair is already thinning, although he gels it stiff to conceal the fact. He’s good-looking in an obvious way, like someone who spends a lot of time flossing. His lips are too thin.

  “Casey sent me down here,” I blurt. “I mean, I was looking for the bathroom.”

  “What?” Andre squints at me. He takes up most of the doorway. He’s big—at least six-four—with hands like meat cleavers.

  My heart is still going, hard. He knows what happened to Madeline Snow. It’s not a suspicion. It’s a certainty. He knows what happened to Madeline Snow and he knows where Dara is and he takes care of problems. It suddenly occurs to me that no one would hear me if I screamed. The music upstairs is too loud.

  “You looking for a job?” Andre says, when I don’t respond, and I realize that I’m still holding the stupid application.

  “Yes. No. I mean, I was.” I shove the paper into my bag. “But Casey said you guys aren’t doing parties right now.”

  Andre’s watching me sideways, like a snake watching a mouse move closer and closer. “We’re not,” he says. His eyes go over my whole body, slowly, like a long, careful touch. He smiles then: a megawatt, movie-star smile, a smile to make people say yes. “But how about you come in and sit down? Never know when we’re going to start up again.”

  “That’s okay,” I say quickly. “I don’t—I mean, I was kind of looking for a position right now.”

  Andre’s still smiling, but something shifts behind his eyes. It’s like the friendly switch has just cut off. Now his smile is cold, scrutinizing, suspicious. “Hey,” he says, pointing a finger at me, and the certainty yawns open in my stomach: He recognizes me, he knows I’m Dara’s sister, he knows I came to find her. All this time, he’s been screwing with me. “Hey. You look familiar. Don’t I know you?”

  I don’t answer. I can’t. He knows. Without meaning to move, I take off down the hall, walking as quickly as I can without breaking into a run, taking the stairs two at a time. I burst onto the dance floor, pinballing off a guy dressed in a dark purple suit who reeks of cologne.

  “Why the hurry?” he calls after me, laughing.

  I dodge a small knot of girls swaying drunkenly in heels, squealing along with the song lyrics. Luckily, the bouncer has temporarily abandoned his post—maybe it’s too late for new arrivals. I push out into the thick night air, heavy with moisture and salt, taking deep and grateful breaths, like someone emerging from underwater.

  The lot is still packed with cars, a tight Tetris formation, bumper-to-bumper—too many cars for the number of people inside. For one disorienting second I can’t remember where I parked. I fish my keys from my bag, clicking the car open, feeling reassured when I hear the familiar beep and see headlights blink expectantly at me. I jog toward the car, weaving between cars.

  Suddenly I’m blinded by the sweep of headlights. A small, dark VW cuts by me, spitting gravel, and as it passes underneath the light I see Sarah Snow’s friend hunched behind the wheel. Her name, heard or read a dozen times in the past ten days, returns to me suddenly. Kennedy.

  I thud a hand down on her trunk before she can fully bypass me. “Wait!”

  She slams on the brakes. I circle around to the driver’s side, keeping one hand on her car the whole time, as if it will prevent her from driving away. “Wait.” I haven’t even planned what I’m going to say. But she has answers; I know she does. “Please.” I place my hand flat on the window. She jerks backward an inch, like she’s expecting me to reach through the glass and hit her. But after a second, she buzzes down the window.

  “What?” She’s holding on to the wheel with both hands, as if she’s afraid it might jump out of her hands. “What do you want?”

  “I know you lied about the night Madeline disappeared.” The words are out of my mouth before I know I’ve even been thinking them. Kennedy inhales sharply. “You and Sarah came here.”

  It’s a statement, not a question, but Kennedy nods, a movement so small I almost miss it.

  “How did you know?” she says in a whisper. Her expression turns fearful. “Who are you?”

  “My sister.” My voice cracks. I swallow down the taste of sawdust. I have a thousand questions, but can’t make a single one come into focus. “My sister works here. Or at least, she used to work here. I think—I think she’s in trouble. I think something bad may have happened to her.” I’m watching Kennedy’s face for signs of recognition or guilt. But she’s still staring up at me with huge, hollowed eyes, as if I’m the one to be afraid of. “Something like what happened to Madeline.”

  Immediately I know it was the wrong thing to say. Now she doesn’t look afraid. She looks angry.

  “I don’t know anything,” she says firmly, as if it’s a line she’s been practicing repeatedly. She starts to buzz up the window. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Wait.” Out of desperation, I stick my hand in the narrowing gap between the car door and the window. Kennedy lets out a hiss of irritation, but at least she rolls the window down again. “I need your help.”

  “I told you. I don’t know anything.” She’s losing it again, like she did downstairs in Andre’s office. Her voice hitches higher, wobbling over the words. “I left early that night. I thought Sarah had gone home. She was drunk. That’s what I thought, when I came into the parking lot and saw the car door hanging open—that Sarah had been too wasted to remember to close it. That she’d taken Maddie home in a cab.”

  I imagine the car, the open door, the empty backseat. Light spilling from Beamer’s just like it is tonight, the muffled thud of music, the distant crash of waves. Up the street, the peaked roof of an Applebee’s, a few low-rent condominiums clinging to the shore, a dine
r and a surf shop. Across the street: a greasy clam shack, a former T-shirt shop, now in foreclosure. Everything is so normal, so relentlessly the same—it’s almost impossible to believe in all the bad things, the tragedies, the dark fairy-tale twists.

  One second she was there; the next she was gone.

  Without realizing it, I’ve been holding on to the car as if it will help me keep on my feet. To my surprise, Kennedy reaches out and grips my hand. Her fingers are icy.

  “I didn’t know.” Even though she’s whispering, this is it: the high note, the crescendo. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.”

  Her eyes are huge and dark, mirrors of the sky. For a second we stand there, only inches apart, staring at each other, and I know that in some way, we understand each other.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say, because I know that this is what she wants—or needs—me to tell her.

  She withdraws her hand, sighing a little, like someone who’s been walking all day and finally gets to sit.

  “Hey!”

  I whip around and freeze. Andre has just pushed out of the front doors. Backlit, he seems to be made wholly of shadow. “Hey, you!”

  “Shit.” Kennedy twists around in her seat. “Go,” she says to me, her voice low, urgent. Then the window zips up and she guns it, her tires skidding a little on the gravel. I have to jump backward to keep from getting crushed; I bang my shin on a license plate, feel a dull nip of pain in my leg.

  “Hey, you. Stop!”

  Panic makes me slow. I skid across the lot, regretting my sandals now. My body feels unwieldy, bloated and foreign, like in those nightmares where you try to run and find you haven’t gone anywhere.

  Andre is fast. I can hear his footsteps pounding on the gravel as he ricochets between parked cars.

  I reach the car at last and hurl myself inside. My fingers are shaking so badly it takes me three tries to get the keys in the ignition. But I do, finally, and wrench the gear into reverse.

  “Stop.” Andre slams up against my window, palms flat, face contorted with rage, and I scream. I punch down on the gas, whipping away from him even as he drums a fist against my hood. “Stop, damn it!”

  I throw the gear into drive, cutting the wheel to the left, my palms slick with sweat even though my whole body is freezing. Little whimpers are working their way out of my throat, spasms of sound. He makes a final lunge at me, as if to throw himself in front of the car, but I’m already pulling away, bumping onto Route 101 and flooring it, watching the speedometer slowly tick upward.

  Come on come on come on.

  I half expect him to appear again on the road. But I check the rearview mirror and see nothing but empty highway; and then the road curves and bears me away from Beamer’s, away from Andre, toward home.

  JULY 30

  Nick

  12:35 a.m.

  I exit the highway in Springfield, where Dara and I used to take music lessons before our parents realized we had less than no talent, and zigzag through the streets, still paranoid that Andre might be pursuing me. Finally I park in the lot behind an all-night McDonald’s, reassured by the motion of the employees behind the counters, and the sight of a young couple eating burgers in a booth by the window, laughing.

  I pull out my phone and do a quick search of the Madeline Snow case.

  The most recent results pop up first, a stream of new blog posts, comments, and articles.

  What Does the Snow Family Know? The first article I click on was posted to the Blotter only a few hours ago, at 10:00 p.m.

  New questions plague the Madeline Snow investigation, it reads.

  Police have recently turned up evidence that Sarah Snow’s statement about the night of her sister’s disappearance may be flawed, or even fabricated. According to the Snows’ neighbor, Susan Hardwell, Sarah Snow didn’t return home until nearly five o’clock that morning. When she did, she was obviously intoxicated.

  “She drove right up on my lawn,” Hardwell told me, indicating an area of churned-up grass by the mailbox. “That girl’s been trouble for years. Not like the little one. Madeline was an angel.”

  So where was Sarah all that time? And why did she lie?

  I click out of the article, wipe my palms against my shorts. It fits with what Kennedy told me about Sarah: she was drinking the night her sister disappeared, maybe at one of Andre’s mysterious “parties.” I keep scrolling through the results and pull up an article about Nicholas Sanderson, the man who’d briefly been questioned about Madeline’s disappearance and then quickly exonerated, not totally sure what I’m looking for, but full of a vague, buzzing sense that I’m getting closer, circling around an enormous truth, bumping into it without fully grasping its shape.

  I can barely hold my phone still. My hands are still shaking. I read half an article before realizing I’ve been processing only one out of every few words.

  Police never formally arrested Mr. Sanderson, nor did they give a reason for his questioning or subsequent release.

  Mr. Sanderson’s wife had no comment. . . .

  “. . . but we’re confident that we’ll soon reach a breakthrough in the case,” stated Chief Lieutenant Frank Hernandez of the Springfield PD.

  Beneath the article are twenty-two comments. Let’s hope so, reads the first one, presumably in response to Lieutenant Hernandez’s last statement.

  The pigs are worse than useless. Not worth the tax dollars spent on their pensions, wrote someone named Freebird337.

  Someone else had commented on this comment: People like you make me want to get my gun, and if there are no cops to catch me, maybe I will.

  And below that, Anonymous had written: he likes young girls

  I stare at those four words over and over: he likes young girls. No capitalizations, no punctuation, as if whoever sat down to type had to do it as quickly as possible. There’s a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach, and I suddenly realize I’m sweating. I punch on the AC, too scared to roll down the windows, imagining that if I do, a dark hand might come out of nowhere, reaching in to choke me with a monster grip.

  It’s nearly 1:00 a.m., but I pull up my home number anyway. More and more, I’m convinced that Dara stumbled onto something dangerous, something involving Andre and Sarah Snow and Kennedy and maybe even Nicholas Sanderson, whoever the hell he is. Maybe Dara figured out that Andre was responsible for what happened to Madeline.

  Maybe he decided to make sure she kept her mouth shut.

  I press my phone to my ear, my cheek damp with sweat. After a while, my home answering machine clicks on—Dara’s voice, tinny and unexpected, asking the caller to speak now or forever hold your peace. I quickly hang up and try again. Nothing. My mom’s probably passed out cold.

  I try my dad’s cell instead, but the call goes straight to voice mail, a sure sign that Cheryl has spent the night. I click off the call, cursing, shoving a sudden mental image of Cheryl, nipped and tucked and freckled, walking around my dad’s house naked.

  Focus.

  What next? I have to talk to someone.

  A cop car has just pulled into the McDonald’s, and two guys in uniform lumber out, laughing about something, One of them has a hand looped into his belt next to his gun, like he’s trying to draw attention to it. Suddenly my next move is obvious. I check my phone again to verify the name: Chief Lieutenant Frank Hernandez, the officer in charge of the Madeline Snow case.

  My phone is protesting its low battery, flashing a weak warning light in my direction when I make the last turn indicated by my GPS app and arrive abruptly at the police station, a hulking stone building that looks like a child’s idea of an old prison. The precinct is set back on a small parking lot, which someone has attempted to make less bleak by inserting various strips of grass and narrow, dirt-filled garden plots. I park on the street instead.

  Springfield is four times the size of Somerville, and even at 1:00 a.m. on a Thursday, the police station is buzzing: the doors hiss open and shut, admitting or releasing cops, some
of them hauling in doubled-over drunks or kids high on something or sullen-eyed, tattooed men who look as appropriate to the landscape as those pathetic flower beds.

  Inside, high fluorescent lights illuminate a large office space, where a dozen desks are fitted at angles to one another and thickly roped cables snake from computer to computer. There are stacks of paper everywhere, in-boxes and out-boxes overflowing, as if a blizzard of form work had recently passed through and then settled. It’s surprisingly loud. Phones trill every few seconds, and there’s a TV going somewhere. I’m struck by the same feeling I had earlier, standing in the Beamer’s parking lot and trying to imagine Madeline Snow vanishing in full view of the Applebee’s: impossible that dark things bump up against the everyday, that they exist side by side.

  “Can I help you?” A woman is sitting behind the front desk, her black hair slicked into so severe a bun it looks like a giant spider clinging desperately to her head.

  I take a step forward and lean over the desk, feeling embarrassed without knowing why. “I—I need to speak to Lieutenant Frank Hernandez.” I keep my voice low. Behind me, a man is sleeping sitting up, his head bobbing to an inaudible rhythm, one wrist handcuffed to a chair leg. A group of cops walk by, rapid-patter talking about a baseball game. “It’s about Madeline Snow.”

  The woman’s eyebrows—plucked to near invisibility—shoot up a fraction of an inch. I’m worried she’ll question me further or refuse or—the possibility occurs to me only now—tell me that he’s gone home for the night.

  But she does none of those things. She picks up the phone, an ancient black beast that looks like it was salvaged from a junkyard sometime in the last century, punches in a code, and speaks quietly into the receiver. Then she stands up, sliding sideways a little to accommodate her belly, revealing for the first time that she is pregnant.

  “Come on,” she says. “Follow me.”

  She leads me down a hallway made narrow by file cabinets, many of them with drawers partially open, crammed with so many files and papers (ever more paper) they look like slack-jawed monsters displaying rows of crooked teeth. The wallpaper is the weird yellow of smoked cigarette stubs. We pass a series of smaller rooms and move into an area of glassed-in offices, most of them empty. The whole layout of the place gives the impression of a bunch of cubic fishbowls.